The best books on religion in an age of doubt

The most famous work by the great American philosopher and psychologist, The Varieties of Religious Experience is anything but a dry chronicle or an exercise in religious propaganda. It’s more a record of a personal intellectual exploration. Though an agnostic himself, James asks us to clear away any preconceptions, favorable or critical, about religion to ponder the link between faith and strength of mind, faith as a critique of modern materialism and a release from egotism, the challenging history of mysticism, and the likelihood that human concepts of God necessarily and rightly evolve over time. Almost disdainful of dogma or institutions or arguments to “prove” the existence of God, James has a different concern. He’s interested in what he calls “prayerful consciousness” as the key to the compassion and heightened awareness that a true, generous faith might inspire. This is a book that can press “Pause” on a lot of easy stereotypes and prejudices about religion. It meant the world to Dorothy Day. 

Armstrong has written brilliant histories of Christianity, Judaism, Islam, Buddhism, and Chinese spirituality, biographies of Buddha and Mohammed, and a memoir of her own spiritual struggles as a nun who left the Catholic Church. Her reputation as the foremost scholar in our time of the history of religions is well-earned. The Case for God is an erudite account of a human need that has existed through all of recorded history and the thwarting of that need, especially in our own polarized time, by fundamentalism, arrogant misreadings of spiritual texts, and notions of God at odds with the selflessness, creativity, and compassion faith is meant to inspire.

Turner asks a great question. How did the United States go from being the deeply religious society of the Puritans and the Founders to a culture of widespread unbelief, especially among the well-educated? His astute analysis of 19th-century America explains why and how agnosticism and atheism gradually became socially acceptable alternatives to faith. As Turner sees it, attempts to “explain” God and fit the Divine into a more rationalistic, scientific, and anti-mystical framework, and the deadening hand of dogma, helped pave the way for a culture resistant to the very idea of God.

Garry Wills, a scholar of Jefferson, Lincoln, modern politics, and religious history, is a major thorn in the side of the Catholic Church. He’s critical of that institution’s checkered past, the questionable primacy of the pope, and the social and political narrowness of its bishops. Yet he is a devout Catholic, a confirmed believer. He sees no contradiction in that. This is a blunt, persuasive book about reconciling an urge to faith in a higher, transcendent power with a sharply critical perspective on an institution that, in Wills’ view, is often less about the teachings of Jesus than a corporate structure pretending to more spiritual authority and infallibility than it has any right to assert.

Saint Augustine is probably the one figure in the history of early Christianity that modern readers, of any faith or no faith at all, need to know about, and no one knows more about this fifth-century Catholic bishop and theologian than the author of this book. A Princeton professor, Brown is one of the world’s foremost historians of Christianity in the ancient world and his research is formidable, but he writes with remarkable elegance and ease. There’s a great openness in all his work, but especially in this biography, to the needs of any curious, educated reader – believer, skeptic, or atheist. Augustine of Hippo also anticipates all of the modern-day issues we might have with Augustine, particularly his unease about sex and development of the questionable concept of original sin, and treats them with a clarifying balance and perspective.